Where's the teeth?

The vampire myth has proven one of the most durably versatile of modern popular culture.

Its inherent themes of good and evil, immortality, sex, obsession, addiction and romance have made it readily adaptable to each new era.

From Bram Stoker's late Victorian invention, Dracu la, through Nosferat u, Bela Lugosi, Frank Langella, Dark Shadows, Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not to mention numerous pulpy incarnations of lesser note, the mythology of the immortal bloodsucker has been reinvented again and again.

Alas, Susan Hubbard's attempt to bring the vampire into the 21st century, and lend it a bit of literary credibility in the process, falls somewhere between disappointing and disastrous.

Nicely titled, The Society of S begins with great promise as a sort of New England gothic. Ariella Montero, daughter of a reclusive Brazilian scientist and a strong-willed Southern belle, is being raised by her now-single father in a large and creepy old house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

By the age of 13, Ariella is starting to have serious questions about her identity, her long-lost mother, and her brilliant, beautiful but remote and very odd father. Home-schooled by her father's research assistant, she is bright but socially backward, her only friends the children of her father's housekeeper.

Undaunted by fear of popular cliche, Ariella has no problem putting two and two together and coming up with a sum, augmented by Internet research, that strongly suggests her father is a vampire. Perhaps she may be one, too.

As long as Hubbard stays with the adolescent Ariella and her search for information, the story is deliciously spooky and compelling. But in a stupendous miscalculation, the author places all her cards on the table about halfway through the book by switching to the father's point of view and revealing exactly how he was made a vampire.

After that, Ariella runs away from home on a determined search for identity. Some parts of the remaining narrative work well as, say, punk adventure tale, or coming-of-age-in-the-new millennium story. But the more Ariella learns, the more suspense drains away.

In an astonishing failure of imagination, Hubbard's re-imagining of the vampire myth robs it of all danger and romance. On the one hand, she wants her vampires to be mere mutants, a sort of related hominid species with no recourse to the supernatural to account for their differences and abilities. Yet where it pleases her, Hubbard invests her vampires with characteristics that could only be rooted in the supernatural - immortality or invisibility.

By the time we are presented with a bunch of vampires at a rustic bar in rural northwestern Florida, they seem about as glamorous or threatening - or interesting - as a meeting of the Rotary Club. No, wait, that's an insult to Rotarians, who can't possibly be this long-winded and dull.

Hubbard's crimes against narrative are worsened by her depiction of the story's chief villain, who, though a vampire, is motivated not by supernal hungers or preternatural evil, but by what amounts to an unrequited homoerotic crush. Tsk, tsk.

In recent years, talents like Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) and Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian) have brought a fresh sensibility and new literary respectability to adult fantasy. Such achievements justifiably elevate reader expectations for similar work.

The Society of S, though not without some small satisfactions, falls far short of this standard.